The Perfectly (Ha!) Painted Kitchen Floor

About a million years ago I blogged here about how I wanted to paint my kitchen floor on account of it being covered with nasty linoleum with nothing of redeeming value underneath. I had excellent intentions friends, but they were hijacked by Maddie's wedding along with all of my money. More on that another day.

But after the fabulous wedding in question we did begin our multi-stepped kitchen face lift. It had to be a face lift because a remodel was out of the budget. I think a true remodel will be possible in a couple of years, but in the meantime, I needed relief from this:

  I actually pulled this photo from the internet (thank you zillow) because I, of course, forgot to take a real "before" photo.

But let's just all agree that it is a bizarre world where the internet has pictures of the interior of my house that I did not put there and that I cannot take down.

I am so happy that I ended up with this.

Shortly after we moved in we replaced the fridge, dishwasher and cooktop with black KitchenAid appliances that we had brought with us or found on Craigslist. And here is a photo detailing my plans for the rest of the update.

 Oops, I forgot to put 8.replace fluorescent light fixture.

Because I'm thinking of this face lift as a kind of band aid until we do the whole remodel enchilada, we didn't want to spend very much money on it. I needed to be able to do most of it myself, which to me means PAINT. And the first thing we did was the floor.

Let's take a photo tour of the process shall we?

Umm, umm, that is so beautiful. First, we sanded all the sub-floor, put on a coat of primer, filled in the large gaps and gouges with wood putty and then sanded again. We did a ton of patching but the floors are so old and beat up there was no way we could make it totally smooth. We decided not to worry about it and embraced the "old ranch house" vibe that we have going on here.

We did the same thing in the eat in area and then swept and vacuumed the heck out of it. After that we wiped the whole thing down with tack cloths. 

Then Marc sprayed a final coat of primer.

In here too. Then we did another quick light sand, vacuum and wipe.

Before we took down all the plastic Marc used his sprayer to put on a coat of Sherwin Williams Porch and floor enamel in a creamy white color. Then we started measuring and marking our squares. We measured to find the center of the floor and then worked out from there. 

I used my acrylic quilting square to make sure all the squares were really square. We marked everything with a regular old pencil.

Then we started painting in the first set of grey squares. You can see we changed from normal blue painters tape to this green stuff called Frog Tape.

It is the real deal my friends. Don't paint stripes or squares or whatever without it. There is virtually no bleed through and you get beautiful, crisp lines.

Once those squares were dry we pulled up the tape, re-taped and painted the rest of the grey.

It looked kind of cool just like this. Do you like my fancy painter sweats? I think I work that look.

And here is the finished product.

When the paint had cured for 48 hours during which time I vigilantly freaked out if any kid tried to set foot in there Marc rolled on two coats of Varathane floor finish.

I did a bunch of reading about what to use as a top coat for painted floors and I chose this because all the reviews said it dried clear where other finishes yellowed. It did dry clear and has held up super well so far.

 I am so happy with how it came out! If you want to know more about how we did this click here for painting the counter top grout, and here for how to paint a wooden sub floor.

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